Lee Meadows

Lee enjoys being slightly off-center.

Lee’s Southern roots are staunchly Mississippian in nature. He grew up in Oxford, home of William Faulkner and Ole Miss. His mama’s side brought him the beauty and tragedy of life in Mississippi’s Delta. His daddy my have been a transplant from Tennessee, but he passed down everything good about growing up poor and proud.

Lee began life as a Southern Man with the distinct and serious challenge of having been skipped when God passed out the genes for hunting, fishing, and sports. If Southern male culture was born on deer stands, in john boats, and on the football field, Lee was definitely an outsider. Science geeks with artistic flair raise eyebrows in small town Mississippi. Time changes things though. He married a woman who can shoot, fathered a fly-fisherman, and learned to embrace his inner dork. He still thinks football and hunting are really boring, though.

Lee is a teacher at heart. He started out teaching high school chemistry and physics, and now coaches science teachers to excellence at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and with school districts around the nation. His teaching experience and Southern roots merged in his first book, published in 2009, in which he guides public school educators to teach evolution without throwing religious students into turmoil. (We told you he was a geek!)

He now proudly makes his home home in Birmingham, Alabama, and celebrates the magic there of its legacy of civil rights. He dreams of a South where education really matters and race really doesn’t. Where we have a plan for going green and stopping the sprawl eating up our beautiful land. Where we celebrate the beauty of our history and confront its atrocities. And where every Southern child knows that any civilized language has a singular “you” and a plural “y’all”.